These videos are bonus content related to the December 2013 issue of Guitar World. For the full range of interviews, features, tabs and more, pick up the new issue on newsstands now, or in our online store.
A great method for creating inventive lines for primary riffs, rhythm parts or solos is to limit one’s focus to just two strings and maintain this two-string approach in the development of long melodic phrases. I have found that doing this forces me to think and play “outside the box,” so to speak, and usually yields surprising results and very cool licks that I may not have otherwise discovered.
Let’s look at an example of this concept. FIGURE 1 is in the key of E minor and is played entirely on the B and high E strings. The line is based on a combination of the E Aeolian mode, also known as the E natural minor scale (E Fs G A B C D), and the E Dorian mode (E Fs G A B Cs D).
Notice that the only difference between Aeolian and Dorian is the sixth scale degree: within the structure of Aeolian, the sixth is minor, or “flatted” (C in the key of E minor), and in Dorian, the sixth is major (Cs in the key of E minor).
PART ONE
PART TWO
It’s a soloing strategy that T-Bone Walker, B.B. King and Albert King all used, and will instantly make your blues solos sound more pro – learn parallel pentatonics and you will set your playing free
“For me, it’s not enough to play an idea once and then move on. I’d rather develop my initial phrase and then morph it into 10 different, thematically connected ones”: Jared James Nichols shows you how to use call-and-response blues phrasing
